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Ask HN: Stock Android phone free of bloatware?

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Re: Ask HN: Stock Android phone free of bloatware?

#311

Post by hinata08 »

jagaerglad wrote: post #310
_rdvw wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/e/OS is currently 7 months behind security updates for the browser/webview for the second time in a row and has a PDF viewer not updated since 2016 yet considers itself the "state of the art" in security. See my full list of issues with it here: https://divestos.org/misc/e.txt

Ok thanks for sharing, this was all new to me. Honestly it was just such a good user experience for me with their app store and just installing all apps seamlessly. It all just worked. Not sure if other custom ROMs have similar experiences since that's the only one I tried The only reason I sold my FP4 and went back to samsung and their android experience was that everybod kept complaininh about mic quality during ca…

iodéOS workd fine as well.

It's based on a LineageOS, but they already have added all the apps and services to use it seamlessly.

Re: Ask HN: Stock Android phone free of bloatware?

#312

Post by hinata08 »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #167
j-bos wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fairphone looks great, BUT they don't sell outside Europe.

I’d love to have a Fairphone as a dev test device but yep, they don’t sell in NA. It seems to be a common thread with interesting phones… back when there was still some buzz around Sailfish you couldn’t get a device running that in NA either, which may have contributed to that project fizzling. There’s a lot of mobile devs with disposable income you’re opting out of by not selling in North America.

>There’s a lot of mobile devs with disposable income you’re opting out of by not selling in North America.

I'm not in this specific industry, but there are some generic trends with the USA

There could be a lot of non tariff trade barriers if you go to the USA.

And you get exposed to a lot of laws, like having to give up all of your data to uncle Sam, having to run specific programs in the company on top of what the EU wants you to do, and be exposed to the maybe not so independent DOJ.

Negociations for industrial products also seem to attract ears at the homeland security, because it's a national security risk when you sell cheaper than American companies.

Contracts are trickiest to write, because justice is based on what you write in the contract, and century of precedents (contracts in mainland Europe are much thinner because there are laws)

And nobody would want to have to report women who get an abortion out of state, nor to dispute the requests, nor to run several legal programs when you're a smallish company, nor to risk having your board held up in jail until you sell to GE (then charges can be dropped).

Also, there is the Buy American act, so you can't just sell in bulk to the government.

European car manufacturers no longer sell in NA, because meeting the weird standards would cost more than they would do by selling their little cars.

Fresh food like cheeses were sometimes suddenly bumped back to Europe.

Overall, if you're a small company, you avoid the USA to not be crushed.

Re: Ask HN: Stock Android phone free of bloatware?

#313

Post by cwalv »

troupo wrote: post #33
cwalv wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm optimistic that "what it could have been" is what it will eventually be. Originally there was just Apple, and their lock-in driven business model. Competitors could emulate them and still get away with it for a while, but it will get commoditized to the same level PCs are at some point.

Funnily enough, originally people thought it was Apple who commoditized mobile computing and software development by getting it from the clutches of telecom providers

I had a buddy who was working on a Linux base for Motorola phones back around 2004/2005. I mentioned this to a EE I worked with back then, who had spent a long time working for Motorola, and he said the carriers "would never allow it." Having the baseband firmware cordoned off was inevitable

Re: Ask HN: Stock Android phone free of bloatware?

#314

Post by scarface_74 »

develop7 wrote: post #303
scarface_74 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve scoured the internet and I can’t find any study that shows people can reliably tell the the difference between 256Kb AAC and lossless.

You can produce anything you want out of lossless file. Other way around? Not so much

That’s true. But that still doesn’t mean that these “audiophiles” aren’t full of themselves

Re: Ask HN: Stock Android phone free of bloatware?

#315

Post by tiberious726 »

whelp_24 wrote: post #258
mschuster91 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, modem firmware even for wifi and BT is pretty much tied down "thanks" to regulations, you won't get far without an exploit bypassing the signature verification. Governments are apparently very afraid of people modifying their chipsets to be more powerful in range than allowed.

Could you link me some of those regulations or a article on it. I am curious

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-A... basically, they use the firmware to enforce compliance with the regs on different regions. If you can load your own firmware, you could make the device no longer compliant.

Re: Ask HN: Stock Android phone free of bloatware?

#316

Post by _rdvw »

hinata08 wrote: post #311
jagaerglad wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok thanks for sharing, this was all new to me. Honestly it was just such a good user experience for me with their app store and just installing all apps seamlessly. It all just worked. Not sure if other custom ROMs have similar experiences since that's the only one I tried The only reason I sold my FP4 and went back to samsung and their android experience was that everybod kept complaininh about mic quality during ca…

iodéOS workd fine as well. It's based on a LineageOS, but they already have added all the apps and services to use it seamlessly.

iodeOS just recently had a 3 month long gap where they didn't publish their source code. See my full list of issues here: https://divestos.org/misc/i.txt

Re: Ask HN: Stock Android phone free of bloatware?

#318

Post by agent008t »

all2 wrote: post #241
agent008t wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just want to mention that the moto camera is made FAR worse by the software. E.g. video on my moto would always be blurry due to bad de-noising settings used by stock software. mcpro24fps allowed me to take dramatically better videos. The difference was HUGE. Same with photos. Custom gcam roms, after a long time of trying different ones and tweaking, gave me dramatically higher quality photos. Again, night and day di…

Can you provide more details about your current setup? Firmware versions, diffs, settings, etc? Maybe tutorials you used to get your camera into good shape?

Moto G31(w), running Android 11.

Tried loads of GCam versions, the one that worked best was LMC8.4R8. Camera and Night Sight work amazingly well, and all 3 cameras are supported.

For videos however I had to use mcpro24fps. I don't recall the details now, but basically videos from stock camera app looked far blurrier than the photos, suggesting a software issue. It turned out to be some denoising feature that is on by default with no option to switch it off. You can also try it out by installing Open Camera, enabling Camera2 API and disabling Noise Reduction in Processing settings.

Unfortunately, I have not found a way to record slow-motion (high-fps) videos without the noise-reduction blur.

Another thing about the Moto G phones is that they seem to often come with the compass uncalibrated to the point of being useless. Here are some instructions: https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/moto-g31/Compass-application-fo...

So in other words, great hardware at an amazing price let down by lousy software.

Re: Ask HN: Stock Android phone free of bloatware?

#319

Post by daneel_w »

hospitalJail wrote: post #288
daneel_w wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Doesnt matter what their security updates are. Those are after the fact." Of course it matters. Whether you get 6 months, 1 year, or 5 years of updates is a huge deal. Their patches' timing don't differ from that of other vendors: most vulnerabilities are fixed before disclosure, few are exploitable, even fewer are found in the wild. >"Bezos got his nudes leaked and Jamal Khashoggi was killed." What stupid, arrogan…

I understand that you're feeling emotional because your favorite corporation experienced a security issue. It's important to recognize that many people develop a strong sense of identity and attachment to certain corporations or brands. This emotional connection often stems from the marketing strategies and manipulative tactics employed by these companies. Corporations invest a significant amount of effort and resour…

Asocial drivel.
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